Oh, by no means did I want to suggest that Gladwell has a forte in evolutionary psychology; if he does, there's nothing to indicate it in what I've read. It's clear that he glosses over many of the details in his work, perhaps dangerously so. And the entire point of Outliers is that social environment is important to success; not exactly an earth-shattering insight, there's a negative Times review that's spot on.

That said, Gladwell says he originally got the idea for 10000 hours from Ericsson and Levitin. At worst, at this point, I think it's somewhat plausible. I still have a lot more searching to do on the subject, but I am interested in what evolutionary psychology might say about the idea -- alas, I'm also not a evolutionary psychologist, so I don't know that either.

Edit: Of course, what I'm really interested in is "Is the idea that it takes 10000 hours to master a skill set true in enough circumstances to make it a useful guideline?" I'm not interested in the viewpoint of evolutionary psychologists on skill acquisition per se.